CHAPTER 1: THE WEIGHT OF THE NAPKIN
The linoleum was the color of dried grease, cracked in long, branching veins where the foundation of the diner had settled into the dust.
Mac leaned heavily against the laminate counter, his knuckles white against the formica. His lungs burned—a dry, rasping heat that tasted of old copper and the cheap tobacco he’d quit twelve years ago. The young man on the floor wasn’t moving yet, just groaning through a broken nose, his camouflage blouse dark with spilled mud and lukewarm coffee. The other one was still wedged between the vinyl booths, eyes wide and tracking Mac with the stupid, slow surprise of a steer behind the stunning pen.
“Get up,” Mac said. His voice didn’t have the volume it used to, but it had the weight. It sounded like gravel shifting under a heavy boot.
The boy in the booth didn’t move. He just clutched his collarbone, where Mac’s palm strike had driven the clavicle down into the meat of his shoulder.
Mac didn’t look at the counter girl. He knew what she’d look like—staring from behind the pie case with her mouth open, the silver studs in her ears catching the yellow fluorescent light. He reached down with fingers that wouldn’t stop shaking and pinched a single paper napkin from the chrome dispenser. It was thin, cheap paper. It tore twice before he got it free.
He wiped a smear of grease from the back of his thumb—not his blood, but the grease from the primary aggressor’s hair where Mac had taken his head and introduced it to the edge of the napkin holder. The metal had made a sharp, clean tink sound. Like a firing pin dropping on an empty chamber.
“You’re deploying in three weeks,” Mac said, looking down at the one with the broken nose. He spoke to the grease stain on the boy’s shoulder template. “I know the patch. Third Battalion. You think you’re iron because they gave you a haircut and a pair of boots that don’t leak yet.”
He dropped the soiled napkin into the cold remnants of his hash browns. The porcelain plate was chipped at the rim, a grey line of raw clay showing through the white glaze.
“You don’t know the weight of it,” Mac muttered. He wasn’t looking at them anymore. He was looking at his own hands. The skin across his knuckles was translucent, spotted with the liver marks of a man who spent his mornings waiting for the sun to clear the highway pines just so he could feel the heat on his shins.
He reached into his pocket, his fingers searching for the brass compass. His thumb slid across the cracked glass face, feeling the tiny, frozen shudder of the needle underneath. It didn’t move. It hadn’t moved since the Mekong delta had filled the casing with silt fifty years ago. But the metal was warm from his thigh, and it kept his fingers from curling into a fist again.
The bell above the diner door didn’t ring, but the draft did. The smell of hot asphalt and diesel exhaust rolled over the threshold, cutting through the scent of burnt bacon.
A shadow fell across the checkered floor, long and narrow, stretching all the way to the base of the juke box. It wasn’t the sheriff. The sheriff drove a cruiser with a bad manifold that could be heard two miles down the ridge. This car had been silent.
Mac turned his head three inches. Through the grease-filmed window, parked right behind his rusted F-150, sat a black sedan with government plates and a thin coating of red clay dust along the rocker panels.
The man standing in the doorway wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he had the stance—the slight cant of the hips to clear a sidearm, the eyes that checked the corners before they checked the bodies. He looked at the two soldiers on the floor, then at Mac.
He didn’t look surprised. He looked like a man who had just found a missing receipt.
“The unit thought you died in San Diego, Mac,” the man said. He reached inside his coat, his hand disappearing into the dark lining. “But the supply logs for this county have been short three crates of ordnance since ninety-four. We finally found the leak.”
